Modeling Source Schemas—Snowflakes and Other Variations
As mentioned previously, SSAS has increased the flexibility of source schema usage to more easily accommodate the most common business requirements that aren't easily modeled using star schemas. This section discusses some of those new or improved options.
Understanding the Snowflake Schema
A snowflake is a type of source schema used for dimensional modeling. Simply put, it means basing a dimension on more than one source relational table. The most common case is to use two source tables. However, if more than two tables are used as the basis of a snowflake dimension, there must be a key relationship between each of the tables containing the dimension information.
Note in the example in ...
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